Fresh May His Memory Remain.

It is the decree of fate that Mark Twain return to
heaven, which loaned the genial humorist to us for a while. He
has been intellectual sunshine to mankind for two generations.

[OMITTED BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY]

Samuel Clemens was a humorist philosopher. He was as
philosophic as humorous. His humor dealt almost altogether with
human nature in its everyday phases, almost in its crude forms.
He was born one of the common people, and all his life in its
formative stages was spent among plain people. There is not much
edge to his jests. They play around their objects as sheet
lightning flashes over the sky. They do not harm and never cause
any fear of danger. But they go to the very heart of human nature
and sound the depths of its aspirations, aims and hopes. In jest
Clemens is what Dickens is in story. There is not the pathos that
marks the "death of Little Nell," but there is as rollicking fun
as in any page of the "Pickwick Papers."

Sam Clemens was an American humorist. His jokes are broad and
good-natured. There is the crudeness in them that is found in
western life of fifty years ago. They lack the subtlety of French
wit. The delicate touch, the fine point, are not there. It is the
thought of the plain and of the mining camp whose color is
caught, whose essence is distilled--not that of the drawing-room
or boulevard.

But that the soul of human nature is preserved in the writings
of Mark Twain is shown by their popularity wherever the language
is understood. A Boston audience laughed at Twain with as much
glee as one in San Francisco. London enjoyed "Pudd'nhead Wilson"
as much as New York. And in the Antipodes the Melbourne Larrigans
laughed with as much abandon as a New York Bowery boy or a San
Francisco hoodlum. Moreover, Oxford undergraduates and university
dons sat side by side with the common herd of the street,
"Townies" and "Gownies" both in uproar at Mark Twain's quaint
jokes.